Dolto, Françoise

Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) worked as a paediatrician and psychoanalyst in Paris from 1939 until 1978. Her thesis, later published, which qualified her as a doctor, was about psychoanalysis and its application to paediatrics. She became one of the first child psychoanalysts in France, having been taught by Sophie Morgenstern, and later became a colleague and friend of Jacques Lacan. Her overriding ethic as an analyst was to recognise the child from birth as a person in their own right, with their own dignity and capacity to understand their place in the world, a subject with their own desire. She believed that the child’s desire to live their life is there from the moment of conception, energy that becomes embodied, a being who seeks a relationship ...